First off, if you’re not watching “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist” yet, why aren’t you? The NBC musical dramedy was one of the best new network series last year and earned a TCA Awards nomination for Best New Program. The good news is that the first season is available to stream on Hulu and Peacock. The better news is that season two returned tonight and the show doesn’t appear to have missed a beat.
LISTEN: Alex Newell wants Niecy Nash to play her mom on “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist” [Podcast]
Of course, Zoey (Jane Levy) still has her unique powers that allow her to understand what people around her are feeling through song. Unlike boring mind-reading, Zoey has to figure out their feelings by watching them perform a musical number. At the end of season one, Zoey’s father Mitch (Peter Gallagher), lost his long battle with the debilitating disease PSP. The season two premiere finds her mom Maggie (Mary Steenburgen), brother David (Andrew Clarke), sister-in-law Emily (Alice Lee) and roommate/BFF Mo (Alex Newell) doing everything they can to get her out of her depressed shell and back into the world. In so doing, she returns to her job at fictional app developer SPRQ Point where she learns a lot can change for the worse after six weeks on leave including some surprising news about her boss, Joan (Lauren Graham). Oh, right, she also has romantic interests Max (Skylar Astin) and Simon (John Clarence Stewart) to balance out her life.
Series creator Austin Winsberg jumped on the phone today to discuss ramping up the new season during the pandemic, whether the Zoey/Max/Simon love triangle will continue, Max and Mo’s business venture, an apparent generational gap in choosing songs for the show and more.
Note: There are spoilers about the season premiere in the interview below.
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The Playlist: How much did the stay-at-home break affect what you had originally planned for season two?
Austin Winsberg: Honestly, very little. The biggest thing that it affected, to be honest with you, is Lauren Graham’s scheduling. Lauren Graham was initially planned to be a bigger part of season two. She had signed on to do this other show in March [Disney+’s “The Mighty Ducks”] that was supposed to be done shooting by the time we started shooting, so she was going to be free and clear to be with us. We had already started to go down a bunch of different story roads with her only to kind of learn pretty late in the process, that the other show was actually shooting at the exact same time. So, we just weren’t able to work out the schedule, so we had to adjust some stuff story-wise after that because we realized we weren’t going to be able to get her, at least for now, for episode one. That was our biggest COVID-related creative shift. Other stuff that I started to anticipate early on in the process was we knew that it was going to be hard to do a lot of interior location work at places like bars and clubs and restaurants with lots of extras. So, we had to kind of do more stuff on our existing sets and create more existing sets that we could go to for the story. That was a bit of a slight rethink just in terms of where are we placing the scenes. Other than that, it was a learning curve and a process with us making sure that we were up to all the safety protocols on set, but we were very relieved once we learned that we were still able to accomplish big dance numbers like, “Hello Dolly,” in episode one. At times it was just about scaling back a bit and maybe doing more scenes here and there with two people in them. But honestly, creatively, my biggest relief is feeling like the show still looks and feels like the same show that it did last season.
Do you even have more outside musical numbers or was that even just too difficult based on your schedule?
We have a few musical numbers outside. There’s the COVID challenge with doing those outside, but the other challenge is Canadian weather. I’m back up in Vancouver right now, and pretty much from November through March in Vancouver, it’s very rainy, it’s very cold. So it’s just hard to do big numbers outside that time of year and just sort of navigating the crowd. A lot of it just has to do with being able to control the environment and once we leave the bubble of our own sets you just can’t control as much. We definitely have a bunch of exterior stuff. We have several episodes in a row where Maggie is working on a house and she’s doing landscape architecture in the backyard of this amazing estate. We have a big musical number in episode five that takes place on the street. So we’re still trying to go out as much as we can.
Is it possible that Lauren could return by the end of the season? And are you guys leaving the door for her to return, hopefully, in a season 3?
1000%. This was just a victim of scheduling and timing this year and the other show that she had committed to. Honestly, she thought she was going to be done. So it was kind of just a bummer all around for all of us.
How far are you in terms of shooting the season?
We’re over halfway through. We have one more day left to shoot episode seven and we got 13 episodes. So, we’re a little more than halfway through.
In terms of the themes of the first episode, was the intention to always begin with Zoey still grieving after the death of her father?
Yes. I definitely felt like so much of the show was personal and it’s based on what happened with my own father and my own family. I always was interested in doing a show about a family trying to move on after the death of the patriarch. I had actually sold a half-hour to CBS a year or two before Zoey’s called, “Moving On,” which took place a year after the death of a father and with the family trying to move on. I had a lot of stories about losing a father and becoming a father at the same time and my mother trying to adjust to being a single woman after being married to the same man after 47 years and trying to be independent and stuff with my own sister. I always knew – I think from the original pitch – that season one was going to end in the death of the father, and season two was going to be about recovery and how do we move on after such a big loss? I think, a lot of what was going on in the world, a lot of people losing loved ones because of COVID, and a lot of the isolation that we’re all feeling, I wanted to do some nods to what was going on during the pandemic. You feel that a little bit with the Zoey self-imposed quarantine she’s been under for six weeks after her dad died not leaving her mom’s house. Subtle nods to what’s been happening in the world without making the show feel like it’s living in the real world.
One of the characters has a line where they say “We’re all going through a lot.” Maybe it was just me projecting, but I felt like it was a little bit of you guys trying to do a nod to that.
I think that might be projecting. [Laughs.]
O.K., well, hey. It was a try.
Everybody has their own things that they’re going through. Mo has been dealing with long-distance relationship issues with Eddie. Max has been dealing with his own issues of being unemployed and trying to figure out what he wants to do next with his life. Even though the world may have stopped for Zoey, everybody is also dealing with their own issues and their own stuff and that’s just trying to make three-dimensional characters who all have their own internal lives and problems.
Let’s talk about long-term storylines for the season that fans are going to be curious about. We have that, “Will they or won’t they?” scenario with Zoey and Max. At the end of the first episode, there was a kiss which could clearly cut to the next episode with them being like, “Oh, why did we do this?” Is there a long-term goal for those two characters and what their relationship will be? And do you feel like the show has to inevitably have them be together?
I think there’s a long-term goal for Max and Zoey. I think there’s long-term plans for Zoey and Simon. I felt like I wanted to move away from the season being a love triangle. I think that there was something about the, “Who will she choose?” and the flip-flopping nature of that could grow a little bit tiresome. Also, I felt like there’s something a little bit immature about it. She’s turning 30 this year on the show. I also feel like if she was so vacillating between two guys, how long would those two guys really just sit there waiting? It’s not a high school show where they’re all kind of in the same high school environment. I felt like it was important to make decisions, choose roads and then go down those roads and see what the consequences of those roads were rather than creating more anticipation of which guy will she choose. I just don’t know how long we can sustain that. I’ve also learned through the sort of social media world that a lot of people have very strong feelings about love triangles. [Laughs.] Many people are very anti-love triangle. So I just felt like it was important to make some decisions and then follow through with that. That felt like a more interesting storytelling thing than just, “This week, I liked Max. This week, I like Simon.”
Outside of the fact that Zoey is getting over the death of her dad and she now has this new position at her job, what would you say her arc is going to be over the season?
The overall trajectory of season one dealt a lot with the decline of her father and on top of that, sort of her increasingly complicated relationship with her own powers. When I started thinking about season two, I started thinking, do we need another heavy illness or a serious way to thing to kind of take over the season all on Mitch dying? When I started thinking about someone getting cancer or something wrong with Dave and Emily’s baby, there was something about that that just felt manufactured to me and kind of like artificial tears. I just wanted to continue to be true and authentic to what my own experience was with death and grieving. I felt grief doesn’t go away in one episode. Grief doesn’t go away just because the person dies. It’s a road. There’s a road to recovery and the road isn’t always a straight line. It’s amazing how you can feel like everything’s fine, and then all of a sudden, a smell or an image or a song with somebody takes you back to a moment or a memory or something, and suddenly you’re right back to that same breathing place again. I wanted Zoey’s arc in season two to be a path of recovery and that that recovery could go through many different phases; that she could rebel, that she could relapse, that she could…there was a lot of R-E words that I had in my pitch, that she could, I don’t know, relapse. Trying to remember with some of the other ones where right now, but not quite like the Kübler-Ross model of dealing with grief, but Zoey’s own model to go through several different phases of her grief process and to have her grief journey be the overarching idea for season two, but not only her own grief journey, but her mother’s grief journey and her brother’s grief journey too because they’re all going through it. So kind of looking through this prism of what is it like when the person who is such a significant, important person in your life is gone? How do we all move on? How do we all recover? What are the ways in which we respond to death? Do we use it as a positive, as you got to make the most out of every day? Do you go to an angry, darker place with it? What are the various ways in which we’re all coping? And then on top of that, how does Zoey’s powers factor into that in her relationship to her powers and her ability to help others? So all of that is continual themes and ideas that are addressed throughout the season.
The show had great song selections in its first season and I know that that has to be difficult, not just from a storytelling aspect, but from a licensing perspective and getting the rights to use the songs in the first place. Was season two easier?
Miraculously, in season one, we got really lucky. There was only one song that we went after season one that we didn’t get. In many cases, I had to write letters personally to the artists to ask them if we could use their music, but all of these won. We got every single song that we chased after with exception of one. I can tell you why. In season two, we’ve similarly gotten what we’ve [asked for]. I don’t know how. Thankfully, everyone says, “Yes.” We do have an amazing music supervisor. Her name is Jen Ross. I will, as soon as we start thinking of ideas for songs and what the songs could be, I instantly text and say, “Scale of one to 10, how difficult is it to get this song or this artist?” I do have a handful of artists that I know are very, very challenging and very difficult to get no matter what that we’ve kind of stayed away from. So, I do have my kind of Holy Grail list of a handful of artists that I’d love to get into the show that I just know up to this point, we haven’t even pursued because the typical response is, “No,” no matter what it is, but other than that 10 artists that I haven’t even tried to chase yet that I’d like to, we’ve been really fortunate. Yeah. I’m always trying to think of popular songs, but interesting songs, looking at songs in a different way. The advantage of the show or the conceit of the show is that we can do any song from any genre or any time period, so just trying to be interesting in our choices, but also the songs for the most part that people know. What’s become actually more complicated in season two is that half of my staff is younger writers and that they want different songs than songs that the studio or the network want. Music is so subjective and what song or popular song or a song that people love? That has seemed to become murkier in season two than season one. I think season one was sort of more like, “This is the song I’m doing, you guys. This is what I want to do.” In season two, people seem to be like, “Well, I don’t know that song. I don’t love that song,” and a lot of it’s generational. So I just try to stick to my gut and I always have rules about what the songs need to accomplish. Either they need to advance the plot, reveal character or be funny or surprising in some way. I’m always trying to stick true to that kind of mantra and yet, still trying to find songs for the most part, that I feel like the majority of our audience will know.
What can you tease us for the season about Mo?
Well, the biggest thing with Mo this season is that Mo and Max get into a business partnership together and we really explore the odd couple dynamics of one character being very right-brain, one being very left-brain, one being very logical and very grounded and computer-based, the other one being much more passionate and artistic. What is it like for those two people to go into business together? I really liked the scenes between Max and Mo in season one and just thought that they were a good pairing. So I really liked the opportunity to explore their relationship and especially when it gets into going into partnership together, which we all know can be challenging. So that’s the biggest arc for Mo is gone down this business lane with Max, but then we also very much continue to explore Mo’s romantic life, continue to explore Mo’s friendship with Zoey and the amount in which [she] leans on Mo and Mo’s points of views and feelings about that. Then Alex has a lot of songs this season, more than last season. We gave Alex a lot to do.
“Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist” season 2 is now airing on Tuesday at 8 PM on NBC.